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Dont Panic

Page 15

by Dont Panic [lit]


  research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but

  there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to

  suspect that if there's any real truth, it's that the

  entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is

  almost cenainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.

  And if it comes to a choice between spending

  another ten million years finding that out, and on

  the other hand just taking the money and running,

  then I for one could do with the exercise.

  - More white mice dialogue, cut from the TV series this time.

  *****************************************************

  Los Angeles was getting Douglas more and more depressed. He

  began to feel he was losing touch with the very things that had

  made him write what he did anyway. Eventually he decided to

  leave.

  "I didn't realise how much I hated LA until I left. Then the

  floodgates opened, and everything came out. It wasn't a good

  period for me, nor a productive period. I had a slight case of

  `Farnham' - that's the feeling you get at 4.00 in the afternoon,

  when you haven't got enough done. So there came a point when

  we all decided to disagree, and I'd come back to the UK where I

  felt more in touch, and try to get it right to my own satisfaction."

  ***************************************************************

  TWO: What are you talking about, professional ethics?

  VROOMFONDEL: Look, don't you mess with me about ethics. Let

  me tell you that I have got three first class

  degrees in Moral Sciences, Ethics, and Funher

  Ethics, a PhD in A Lot Funher Ethics, and have

  written three bestselling books on `Why Sex Is

  Ethical', `Why More Sex Is Ethical' and `Five

  Hundred and Seventy Three More Totally

  Ethical Positions', so I know what I'm talking

  about when I say that ethically that machine is a

  write-off. Get rid of it.

  - Unused dialogue from first radio series.

  **************************************************************

  Douglas returned to England, where he began to work once more

  on the screenplay of the film, in addition to beginning work on So

  Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and the Hitchhiker's computer

  game.

  At that time he told me, "What I'm trying to do with the film

  is use a completely different selection process to that which went

  into the TV series. We are trying to show the stuff you didn't see

  in the 1'V series. So if you go back to the book, and find all the

  things not in the TV series. . . that's the film!

  "Also, a lot of the film comes to have a completely different

  rationale. I've just put the scene with Marvin and the Battletank

  into the film, from the second book."

  18

  Liff, and Other Places

  *****************************************************

  ZAPHOD: Soulianis and Rahm! Two ancient furnaces of light

  that have warmed this dead and barren planet

  through the countless millennia, guarding its

  priceless secrets. Just looking at it makes me feel I

  could really, you know really. . . write travelogues.

  - Unused dialogue from first radio series script.

  *****************************************************

  Douglas Adams and John Lloyd have collaborated on a number of

  projects. Some have already been mentioned. One, Dr Snuggles,

  was an animated television series for which two episodes were

  scripted by Adams and Lloyd. Dr Snuggles was "a cross between

  Professor Branestawm and Dr Dolittle" and produced by a Dutch

  television company for the international market.

  One of their episodes apparently won them an award,

  although neither of them has seen either the award or the series.

  Dr Snuggles was essentially a children's series, and while the

  Adams/Lloyd scripted episode I have seen (Dr Snuggles and the

  Nervous River) was superior to the run of scripts for the series,

  fans of Douglas Adams's or John Lloyd's work are missing

  nothing if they haven't seen it. The plot, however, was science

  fiction: Dr Snuggles meets a nervous river too scared to go down

  to the sea because huge chunks of the sea are disappearing. After a

  number of adventures, the Doctor goes off into space to discover

  that the water is being taken by aliens who thought we didn't

  want our water because we kept throwing rubbish into it. They

  give the water back, Dr Snuggles ties it to the back of his

  spaceship and returns to Earth.

  Another project of theirs was rather better known in Britain,

  but for some reason not a success in the US: a curious book

  entitled The Meaning of Liff.

  It began during the holiday in Corfu, which John and

  Douglas had booked to write The Hitchhiker's Guide to the

  Galaxy, but during which, for reasons already chronicled, only

  Douglas wrote the book. They were sitting in a tavern, playing

  charades and drinking retsina with a few friends. They had been

  drinking retsina all afternoon, and after a while decided they

  needed a game to play that did not require as much standing up.

  Douglas remembered an English exercise he had been set at

  school, fifteen years earlier, and suggested it as a game.

  The rules were fairly simple: someone would say the name of

  a town, and someone else would say what the word meant.

  As John Lloyd explained, "It was a fantastically enjoyable

  holiday. For a month we got drunk, and we'd stay up all night

  playing these incredibly long games of charades.

  "Then we began playing this placenames game. Near the end

  of the holiday, I started writing them down, not having very much

  else to do. By the end of the holiday, we had about twenty of these

  things, some of the best ones in The Meaning of Liff, like `Ely'-

  the first, tiniest inkling that something has gone terribly wrong.

  "Many of them were to do with Greece, sitting in

  wickerwork chairs and so on. And we kept doing them after the

  holiday was over."

  Douglas clarified the concept on a press release for The

  Meaning of Liff:

  "We rapidly discovered there were an awful lot of experiences, ideas

  and situations that everybody knew and recognised, but which never got

  properly identified simply because there wasn't a word for them. They

  were all of the, `Do you ever have the situation where. . . ? or, `You know

  what feeling you get when...?' `You know, I always thought it was just me...' All it takes is a word, and the thing is identified.

  "The vaguely uncomfortable feeling you get from sitting in a seat

  which is warm from somebody else's bottom is just as real a feeling as the

  one you get when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you,

  but hitherto only the latter has actually had a word for it. Now they both

  have words. The first one is `shoeburyness', and the second, of course, is

  `fear'.

  "We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts

  and began to realise what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English

  Dictionary is. It simply doesn't recognise huge wodges of human

  experience.<
br />
  "Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you

  went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn't - or wasn't

  - a word for it, everybody thinks it's something that only they do and

  that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to

  realise that everybody else is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing

  when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for

  is `woking'."

  Following John Lloyd's disappointment with the

  Hitchhiker's book, he was similarly disappointed over a comedy

  series he was meant to have been co-writing, To the Manor Born,

  starring Penelope Keith. Instead he found himself producing a

  BBC 2 satire show, Not the Nine O'Clock News, starring Pamela

  Stephenson, Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.

  After a while Not the Nine O'Clock News became a major

  success (which, according to Douglas, meant that John in his turn

  spent a while being as obnoxious as Douglas had been in the early

  days of the success of Hitchhiker's), and spawned a number of

  records and books.

  One of the books was the NOT 1982 calendar. Lloyd found

  himself stuck for material to fill in space at the bottoms of some

  pages, and at the tops of some pages, and in quite a few of the

  middles, so he dug out 70 of the best definitions (he had

  accumulated about 150) and inserted them into the book as

  extracts from The Oxtail English Dictionary.

  Faber and Faber, John's publisher, were very enthusiastic

  about the definitions.

  "They said, `This is the best idea in the whole calendar-

  why don't you do it as a book? This time it was the reverse

  situation: I hadn't expected Douglas to be very interested in

  doing it as a book, so I expected to do it on my own. Then

  Douglas said, `Let's do it together' and 1 said, `Yes!', I can't stand

  doing things on my own, which is one reason why I'm a producer

  and not a writer."

  The Meaning of Liff was written in September 1982, in a

  rented beach hut in Malibu. The two of them sat on the beach,

  watched the ocean, drank beer, thumbed through a gazetteer, and

  thought up definitions. Douglas also started learning to scuba

  dive at this time. (He finished learning to scuba dive in Australia

  two years later, and has a number of wise sayings on the subject

  of sharks.) It was published in November 1983 by Pan (in a co-

  publishing deal with Faber and Faber) in a remarkable format

  (153mm by 82mm); a very small, very slim, very black book, with

  a bright orange sticker on the cover that proclaimed, "This Book

  lVill Change Your Life ! "

  The `selling point summary' that went out to reps included:

  "Small format for discreet consultation on retrieval from inside

  pocket", "Authors expert in field" and "possible early quote from

  John Cleese's psychoanalyst" as selling points.

  On its release it went to number four in the Sunday Times

  bestseller lists. However, overall it didn't do as well as a

  Hitchhiker's book or, for that matter, a Not the Nine O'Clock

  News book.

  As Douglas said at the time, "Normally I don't enjoy writing

  at all, but it was a real pleasure doing this book. But what's really

  nice is that my family and so on, who say, `Yes dear, it's nice

  about Hitchhiker's' - John's say the same about Not the Nine

  O'Clock News - love this book. My kid brother and sister like

  it.

  "lt's selling briskly, but not as well as it could do. I think

  that's because people have no idea what it is - it's totally

  enigmatic and anonymous, unless you happen to recognise our

  names. In both cases the product is more famous than the names

  - but on the other hand it has terrific word-of-mouth.

  "But I enjoy it. I can reread it, whereas normally I cringe

  when I read my stuff."

  The Meaning of Liff also kicked off a minor controversy in

  the newspapers. Although it was well, and extensively, reviewed

  (primarily because it was so easily quotable - despite the

  presence of the word `Ripon', described in The Meaning of Liff

  as: `[of literary critics] To include all the best jokes from the book

  in the review to make it look as if the critic had thought of them'),

  there were also accusations of plagiarism.

  Having just undergone a traumatic time trying to get a

  certain advertising agency to pay up for having stolen the idea for

  an ad campaign using the phrase The Oxtail English Dictionary

  (see `Cannock Chase' in The Meaning of Liff), Adams and Lloyd

  were rather put out when it was widely pointed out that the idea

  had originated in an essay written by Paul Jennings, called Ware,

  Wye and Watford published in the late 1950s.

  Douglas suggested that the teacher who gave him the exercise

  had probably got the idea from the Jennings book, and sent

  Jennings a note of apology.

  (Miles Kington in The Times rushed to Adams's and Lloyd's

  defence, pointing out the essential difference between the two: that

  while Jennings had been primarily interested in the sound and

  flavour of the placename [he suggested that `Rickmansworth'- as

  in `a small cafe in. . .' - was really the nominal rent paid to the

  Lord of the Manor for hay; it sounds right, but isn't particularly

  funny], Lloyd-Adams had been far more concerned in amassing

  meanings for which there were no words previously in existence,

  the actual word or placename they picked being less than

  important.)

  An additional coincidence (although certain devoted fans

  have woven intricate conspiracy theories around it) was its release

  at almost exactly the same time as the Monty Python film, The

  Meaning of Life. The film's title sequence shows the title, carved,

  in classically modest Terry Gilliam fashion, out of huge slabs of

  rock; a lightning bolt removes the bottom bar of the E, turning it

  into an F - The Meaning of Liff. It was a meaningless

  coincidence, discovered by Douglas and Terry Jones slightly

  before the release of either of their products, but too late for

  anything to be changed. It was a coincidence but if you wish to

  concoct conspiracy theories (and what does happen in the forty-

  second minute of the film?) then go right ahead.

  Although The Meaning of Liff was published in the US in a

  different format and with some extra words, it is the least known

  of Douglas's books there.

  "I did some college readings in America. You would think

  that a high concentration of people who knew what I had written

  would be in those audiences, yet hardly anybody there had heard

  of The Meaning of Liff. I read sections, and they went over well.

  People kept asking me where they could find the book. No one

  could find it. I think it suffered from nobody knowing what to do

  with it. "

  `Liff', incidentally, is a town in Scotland. Its meaning? A

  book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For

  instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words,

  "This book will ch
ange your life! ".

  Postscript: Adams and Lloyd, assisted by Stephen Fry, returned to Liff in their

  work for The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, co-edited by

  Douglas Adams, and in 1990 an expanded version, The Deeper Meaning of Liff,

  was published.

  19

  SLATFAT Fish

  *************************************************************

  CUT TO A BLURRY CLOSE-UP OF ZAPHOD

  LYING ASLEEP ON THE GROUND.

  FORD: Zaphod! Wake up!

  ZAPHOD: Mmmmmmmwwerrrr?

  TRILLIAN: Hey come on, wake up.

  SLOWLY THE PICTURE FOCUSSES.

  ZAPHOD: Just let me stick to what I'm good at, yeah?

  HE GOES BACK TO SLEEP.

  FORD: You want me to kick you?

  2APHOD: Would it give you a lot of pleasure?

  FORD: No.

  ZAPHOD: Nor me. So what's the point? Stop bugging me.

  TRILLIAN: He got a double dose of the gas. Two windpipes.

  ZAPHOD: Hey, lose the talk, will you? It's hard enough trying

  to sleep anyway. What's the matter with the

  ground? It's all cold and hard.

  FORD: It's gold.

  PULL BACK RAPIDLY AS ZAPHOD LEAPS

  TO HIS FEET.

  WE SEE THAT THEY APPEAR TO BE

  STANDING ON A VAST SHINING PLAIN OF

  SOLID GOLD.

  ZAPHOD: Hey, who put all that there?

  FORD: It's nothing.

  ZAPHOD: Nothing? Gold by the square mile nothing?

  TRILLIAN: This world is an illusion.

  ZAPHOD: You pick now to become Buddhists?

  FORD: It's just a catalogue.

  ZAPHOD: A who ?

  FORD: A catalogue. It's not real. Just a projection.

  ZAPHOD: How can you say that?

  HE DROPS TO HIS KNEES AND STARTS

  FEELING THE "GROUND".

  TRILLIAN: We both came round a while ago. We shouted and

  yelled till somebody came. . .

  FORD: And then carried on shouting and yelling till they

  put us in their planet catalogue. They said they'd

  deal with us later. This is all Sens-O-Tape.

  HE POINTS UP INTO THE SKY.

  WE SEE THERE ARE SOME WORDS. THEY

  SAY:

  "MAGRATHEAN PLANET CATALOGUE. BK

  THREE.

  DESIGN 35/C/6b.

  `ULTRASULTAN'S ECSTASY'.

  LANDFORMATION: GOLD.

  OPTIONAL EXTRAS: SILVER MOON,

 

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